Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 7:46 pm Post subject: grad school: how necessary is it to seek a top school?

When looking into schools near me with ESL Masters programs, many of them are not schools that have particular reputations (at least that I'm aware of).

Insofar as I can, I want to judge a program on the quality of the education. I also have to take money into account. But here is my question: In my career, will it ultimately matter if I got an MA TESOL from a well known school or got a similar MA from a not well known school? Does the name recognition of the school wind up playing a big role in your job hunt?

This is my experience in the field so far: I volunteer taught part time for a year in Minneapolis, then went through a 140-hour Advanced CTESOL program in San Francisco, then taught Oral English for a year at a Chinese university. My eventual goal is to teach and work with immigrants in America.

In my career, will it ultimately matter if I got an MA TESOL from a well known school or got a similar MA from a not well known school? Does the name recognition of the school wind up playing a big role in your job hunt?

My eventual goal is to teach and work with immigrants in America.

No, it doesn't matter as long as the degree program is through a regionally-accredited university, such as a state uni (assuming you expect to attend a uni in the US). In addition to fitting your budget, make sure the courses suit your career needs and goals as well. Although you already have a TEFL cert, I also suggest your MA program include a teaching practicum; you could possibly do your supervised practice teaching with immigrants. By the way, there's a thread related to this topic: http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=95138.

Since your end goal is to work with immigrants in the US, then it may be important. "Top schools" seems to be a US thing (Plus people who went to Cambridge or Oxford, I guess). "Well-known" seems to be more along the lines of how people from other countries think about it- and it can be based on program rather than entire university, and it can change according to who is in charge of the program, whether the particular slant of the program happens to be trendy or not, etc.

IME Outside of the US, many (possibly most?) people have never even heard of most of the schools that (American) people claim are the 'best'- and when asked if they mean the best in the state or what, the reply seems to always come back that the school is 'the best in the world'-- even though not a single non-American had even heard of it, despite the fact that some of them even majored in the same subjects.

With a subject like TESOL, there are different philosophies around about the very nature of language learning- does language come primarily through social interaction (sociolinguistics stress- the functionalists), or through occurrences in the brain (psycholinguistics stress- the formalists). Generally speaking US universities stress very, very heavily psycholinguistics, and universities in other countries can be more even (what I've been told about universities in the UK) or stress very heavily sociolinguistics (Australian universities). It makes it impossible to say which is the 'best' university for applied linguistics.

No, it doesn't matter as long as the degree program is through a regionally-accredited university, such as a state uni (assuming you expect to attend a uni in the US).

While I agree that this is the case in most of the world, it is much less true in the US. It will matter most in the US if you want to work at the university level, where the reputation of the school granting your degree can bolster (or decrease) your competitiveness. However, it will matter less to many community-based programs which provide much of the ESL work with immigrants.

No, it doesn't matter as long as the degree program is through a regionally-accredited university, such as a state uni (assuming you expect to attend a uni in the US).

While I agree that this is the case in most of the world, it is much less true in the US. It will matter most in the US if you want to work at the university level, where the reputation of the school granting your degree can bolster (or decrease) your competitiveness. However, it will matter less to many community-based programs which provide much of the ESL work with immigrants.

We're on the same page with this one; my response was specific to the OP's goal of teaching newcomers versus that of a university, prep year teaching situation.